a history of collaboration, which includes CareFusion purchasing technology from CME.
—Lexington, MA-based Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CBST]]) paid $551 million earlier this year to acquire Optimer Pharmaceuticals, which moved its headquarters from San Diego to Jersey City, NJ, at the end of 2012. Now Cubist is laying off as many as 177 Optimer employees. Almost all of the affected positions are in New Jersey, according to a Cubist spokeswoman.
— Zach Hornby, the chief financial officer and vice president of corporate development at San Diego-based Ignyta, talked with me about the reasons behind Ignyta’a strategic shift to developing cancer drugs and companion diagnostics. Earlier this year, Ignyta acquired San Diego-based Actagene Oncology. More recently, Ignyta licensed two anti-cancer drug candidates from Nerviano Medical Sciences, a former Pfizer/Pharmacia cancer drug R&D center in Italy.
—At its regular meeting in San Francisco, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state’s stem cell agency, awarded almost $4.2 million in funding to Thomas Kipps at UC San Diego to test drugs that have already been approved or are under evaluation to assess their effectiveness against leukemia stem cells. The grant was part of $61 million in funding allocated by the agency in a round that targets leukemia and solid tumor cancers, such as breast and prostate cancer, in patients who have not responded to conventional treatment.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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